Slashdot Mirror
Parents Have No Right To Dead Child's Facebook Account, German Court Rules (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A German court rejected a mother's demand on Wednesday that Facebook grant her access to her deceased daughter's account. In the ruling, which overturned a lower court's decision, the Berlin appeals court said the right to private telecommunications extended to electronic communication that was meant only for the eyes of certain people. In the Facebook case, the mother of a 15-year-old who was hit and killed by a subway train in Berlin in 2012 had sought access to her daughter's account to search for clues as to whether the girl had committed suicide. Facebook had refused access to the account, which had been memorialized, meaning it was effectively locked and served as a message board for friends and family to share memories. A regional court in Berlin had ruled in favor of the mother in late 2015, saying that the daughter's contract with Facebook passed to her parents according to German laws on inheritance. It had also said that the girl's right to privacy was not protected because she was a minor and it was up to her parents to protect her rights. The appeals court said on Wednesday that the right to private telecommunications outweighed the right to inheritance, and that the parents' obligation to protect their daughter's rights expired with her death.
but her rights remain?
It seems to me like what the courts actually decided is that, when your child dies, Facebook has more rights to their personal property than you do.
It's not the right of privacy of the daughter, that the ruling was about, it's the right of privacy of the people she was talking to (probably mostly other minors the parents of the daughter were not legal wardens of). And those conversations thus are protected by the Secrecy of correspondence.
And that is wrong from a legal point of view in Germany. There are stages at which people get legal autonomy. For example, at 14 they get religious autonomy and their parents from that time have no legal authority anymore about that question. For example, at 14 you can legally exit a church on your own say-so. People also get economic decision power to some degree at different ages and can do binding contracts up to certain amounts and of certain natures. And no, their stuff does not belong to their parents when it was legally acquired by them.
Yours is also a hugely immoral stance as you basically advocate that children are their parents property. I find that idea quite repulsive.
Incidentally, "privacy" is a human right and applies to anybody being recognized as human. It can only be limited because circumstances force that, e.g. for a toddler. But somebody 15 years of age certainly has that human right mostly in its full form.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
When your child dies, then the living people who communicated with your child retain their right of communication privacy, and your curiousity as a parent does not quite outweigh that right.
Imagine how pissed you would be if your girl-friend is run over by a truck and immediately afterwards, her parents are starting to read (and possibly circulate) all the juicy details of your prior conversations.
It's not really a legal issue but the very sad case of a mother unwilling to let go of her child and what remains of the child's life.
I'm a father and I think I'd probably struggle to let go of anything of a life that I had created, loved and cared for.
A virtual online persona, in this case, has become the bedroom of the deceased that the mother wants to lock, preserve and occasionally visit when the grieving gets tough.
If, like someone else commented, she had the password for the account she's almost certainly already been through it looking for answers.
Some very good insightful comments on here from others about needing to protect the privacy of the living who were friends.
Still my heart goes out to the family.
That (limited) viewpoint is usually the attitude adopted by legal minors.
The reality is that this isn't just a rights issue. It's a rights and responsibility issue. I don't know what the situation is in Germany, but in the U.S. the parents are fiscally responsible for their children's misdeeds until they become a legal adult. If a 17-yo drives a car into a store and destroys it in a fit of rage and can't pay for the damages himself, it falls upon the parents to pay for it.
So it isn't treating children as if they're property, as it is keeping rights and responsibility linked. If a 14-yo wants to be declared legally independent of his or her parents, I don't think most people would have a problem with it as long as he also became financially and criminally responsible for all his deeds as if he were an adult. Unfortunately, the way most teens want it is that they get all the rights of an adult, but their parents still have to bear all the responsibility (including paying for food, clothing, and shelter).
Without the linking of responsibility to rights, the parents effectively become wage slaves to children who are free to live as they wish. That too is immoral and repulsive. It's why Monsanto's stance with Round-Up Ready seed is immoral. They want all the rights that come with ownership of the patented seed (farmers who use it are forced to pay for it), but none of the responsibility that comes with it (organic farmers who don't want it can't sue them for damages if the seed blows onto their farms).